4 Reasons You Should Add Video to Your Marketing Strategy

Data suggests that digital video ad spending will increase from $9.9 billion, where it currently stands in 2016, to $28.08 billion by 2020. This means within advertising, video is the fastest growing category on mobile, on desktop and overall, as reported in a survey conducted by Cowen and Company.

Video is rapidly becoming the new standard in B2B and B2C marketing, and for good reason. It looks great, sounds great, catches and holds attention…we could go on. But if you’re still on the fence about adding video to your marketing strategy, consider these four things that video can do for you.

Why should you use video marketing?

1. Open the Door for Deeper Engagement

We’ve talked about the importance of establishing an emotional connection with your customers. You can read the long version here, but these are the two biggest takeaways:

Humans don’t rely on rational thought to make decisions; they’re led by emotional responses.

Humans are extremely visual creatures. 90% of information is taken in visually, and ideas learned through video communication are retained 68% more effectively than text.

So what does that tell us? Marketing campaigns achieve maximum impact when they engage customers with an emotional story conveyed in the most visual way possible. If you engage your customers with a video, they’re really going to remember what they watched. But more importantly, they’ll remember how it made them feel.

That’s where the true value of video marketing comes in. Think about brands like Hallmark, Volkswagen, Microsoft, and Red Bull who are masters at conveying emotion -- whether it’s humor or sadness, surprise or nostalgia -- through video marketing. Their audiovisual stories have helped define and reinforce the core values of each brand, the same values consumers feel like they’re aligning themselves with when they choose that brand.

2. Earn Your Customers’ Trust

While it’s easy making a new car look sexy, try making an insurance, telco or utilities provider entice in the same way. When people shop for these types of services, the level of emotional engagement is typically much lower.

This is when trust really comes in to play. Of course people want to trust the companies they’re buying products from, but it’s a different, deeper kind of trust that’s sought once you enter the services industry. Customers want to trust that they’re getting the best deal, that they’re being proactively looked after and that when they encounter an issue with their bill or service, a team is going to be there to get them back up and running quickly.

Video is an effective way of putting people at ease. Like we said above, the easy-to-understand nature of video communication opens the door for a deeper engagement. Because customers understand and remember the information they receive, they feel more in control of their brand experience.

When it comes to explaining policies, plans and contracts, video can be especially helpful. 52% of consumers report that they’re more confident in their purchase decisions after watching a video.

3. Raise The Bar

Let’s take a quick detour and talk about programmatic creative for a moment. It’s a huge buzz-phrase right now because suddenly advertisers are able to take customer data and develop creatively segmented advertising that can be shown to the most applicable people. If you are a woman from Town X shopping for new shoes, you’re shown an ad for a women’s shoe store with a location nearby. It’s an extremely efficient way of hyper-targeting marketing campaigns, and advertisers have been seeing87% greater return through programmatic vs. non-programmatic ads.

Now that programmatic creative has had time to evolve, it’s expanded into video marketing with the arrival of Personalized Video. Instead of showing all of your customers the same video, you can now use any available customer data to deeply personalize each and every video that’s viewed. Speaking to each customer using her name is a great start to any conversation, but the video can be made far more relevant and engaging through the inclusion of specific bill details, location information or any other pertinent data...the possibilities are really only limited by your imagination.

Back to your marketing plan. How many times have you heard executives asking for ways to raise the bar, for ideas that innovate, for campaign proposals that are a cut above the rest? That’s where Personalized Video is going to be your best friend. It’s already an award-winning medium that increases View Through Rate, Click to Open Rate, Call To Action Conversion and overall brand awareness. It’s essentially the marketing expressway for creating wide-mouthed “wow moments” with your consumers and big smiles with your boss.

4. Don’t Break a Sweat

No one said personalization had to be difficult. In fact, it’s pretty darn easy. Some real-time rendering platforms give marketers the tools to build cinematic quality Personalized Videos at scale, using any type of creative. More recently, launching these Personalized Video campaigns has become far more seamless due to the inclusion of complete authoring, composing and distribution toolsuites that make launching and maintaining new campaigns a breeze.

What's Next?

If you found this useful and you'd like to do incredible things with the latest marketing tools and data-driven video marketing strategy, we invite you to download this ultimate guide to seamlessly and easily launching your first video campaign.

Article by Alexandra Gehringer

Alex is Senior Creative Marketing Writer at Idomoo. Her goal is to give brands and marketers the information they need to achieve peak customer engagement. Through compelling, highly-relevant marketing initiatives built around Idomoo's Personalized Video Technology, she believes every brand can create an emotional, one-to-one connection with their customers.

Julaina Dahlan

Hi Alexandra! Thank you for an interesting post! It is a great advise that to include Video communication as part of the marketing strategy! I have just completed my module on Living and Working on The Web and I have to agree with you strongly that we are "visual creatures" and the "easy-to-understand nature of video communication opens the door for a deeper engagement". This is definitely true as I believe we as consumers can empathise more on the brand value and experience when we watch a video rather than just a normal Billboard Ad. Just like how Apple do its TV ads. There is always an emotional connection attached to it. Also, you mentioned on Personalised Video. I did not know such video existed and how effective it is! Thank you for educating me on it! My question to you is: will it be applicable to existing consumers to help companies retain them? I hope to hear from you soon!